 My name is Simple Nomad. I wanted to come up and introduce my good friend here who I've known for a long time through conferences like this, actually through this conference where I first met him, where I sat in the audience and listened to a talk he gave where I was just absolutely mesmerized by what he had to say. He always seems to be on topic and he always seems to be in touch with kind of the more, you might call it social, virtual, and some of the psychological ramifications of what we do in and about technology. So he's always interesting. He's got some books to pimp. This Island's in the clickstream, which I recommend you get. Yeah, some people fans this book. It's a good book. I won't mention the fact that it's a collection of articles which you can probably download online and get for free, but you probably should go ahead and buy the book. But nonetheless, listen to what he has to say. He's a great guy. Mr. Richard Thiem. Thanks, Nomad. We'll get that out of the way right away. Yeah, you can... I'll have a couple to give away. And of course, since I bought them from my publisher for a price so low I won't even embarrass myself by mentioning it. I have a few copies to sell discounted heavily off the cover price. You can buy it at the bookstore for the cover price, or go to Australia and pay twice the cover price, or go online and get it for 50 cents. But that would be rude. I have a number of things I'm going to give you for anyone who wants them as well that I will mention contextually in the talk, and those are all free. This is a slightly different talk that I've done in the past. It will link to the things I've done. It will be more personal, because the bottom line is I said last year that I thought after 10 years of speaking here that pretty much does it. You don't want to overstay your welcome and you certainly do not want to get stale, and you become afraid that you're losing your cutting edge. You know, security is mainstream in a lot of ways. And everybody's working who can get a job. It's not like the old days. So you want to be careful to, as Nomad suggested, you try to do, stay in touch with the deeper currents of the life of technology and where it's leading us. And that's what I'm going to be talking about. But the reason I'm back is because Jeff said, I know you're kind of wanting to migrate and evolve, which is the whole point. And you're in the process of reinventing yourself for like the fourth time in your life in a major way. Why don't you come back and talk about how to reinvent yourself? So that's what the primary focus of the talk is going to be about, but it's going to be linked to technology and to work I've done in security and intelligence. And I will talk a little more about that than I ever have before to other pieces. What I've been doing here for the last 10 years about how technologies disrupt us and provide the opportunity for a radical reinvention of ourselves, radical reconstruction of our very persona, which we present to the world and in and through which we act and live in the world. That's the bottom line. And I guess because I have done that more of necessity than by design and because I'm old enough now, a gray back, a silver back, whatever you want to call it, an old fart. You have a track record of looking back and saying that you did survive these radical transitions that if they do not kill you are the engine of your transformation. When it's linked to these technologies, then it is easy to look at the technologies, including the things that are being done in with biotech and nanotech and other areas to look forward and say in the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, where are you and your children going to be going and where do you find the skills that you're going to have to have to reinvent yourself over a period of longevity that is going to increase radically going forward? Someone bringing a child into the world today might see that child live to 150. You know the work they're doing and in a hundred years they might very well have the technologies which will counteract things we think of as traditional aging. This is not going to be that big a social problem. People that turn of the century, the 20th century, 1900 lived on average to 47. We today live on average to 78 and nobody is objecting to it. People used to be shorter now they're taller. We don't object to it. We're going to be able to engineer and enhance at least many, many of the attributes that have been provided through accidents of birth in the past and the technologies you are inventing and securing will contribute to that transformation. So what I'm going to be talking about is not simply adapting to new stages of life although it includes some of that too. It's about proactively from the ground up from the inside out inventing personas appropriate to the multiple media through which you choose to manifest yourself in life and live electronically and physically. You remember Roy and Blade Runner, the replicant who said we're not computers, Sebastian. We're physical by which he meant we were quote unquote they were replicants were human or humanoid but in fact they were computers and the distinction between them is going to become increasingly blurred as it is between artificial and natural or private and public. When I've been asked to address the issues of private and public partnerships, the first thing you have to ask people to examine in depth is the fact that those words have ceased to have meaning because of the transformation of geopolitical and corporate structures in the world. So the big challenge is as was posed to me by a friend from NSA, how do you live vibrantly in a world without walls and continue ongoingly to free your mind from the structures that constrain it and it is also about how do you live at the edges literally maintaining your balance both personally and professionally not necessarily comfortably because God forbid we should get to complacent and comfortable then we lose our edge but managing the cognitive dissonance and the discomfort of intentional self-generated ongoing alteration and transition of our very selves and I'll talk a little about how important it is to recognize when we have gone over the edge when you start getting feedback from people that says you are over the line by the time a third person said it to me in the space of a week I thought I ought to pay attention. What happens if you go too far over the line I'm thinking of a guy at the end of his career with the CIA who had invented personas so often in order to be different identities to different people in different contexts in the world that he literally had lost himself the personas as it were floated off and lost their rootedness in the metacelph from which he ought to have been aware that they were coming and as another friend in the agency said watching what had happened to him was a tragedy because he became a hollow man he had mastered the invention of multiple modular personas but he had failed to master the spiritual task of linking them to a primary although unnameable point of reference inside himself from which the ability to reinvent ourselves comes and this is the definition of mastery anybody any one of you can reinvent yourself as called forth by circumstances or external events but if you happen to do it and don't know you did it and don't do it intentionally then it just happens to happen but if you have your hands on the levers within yourself from which that persona comes you can see why we're talking about going far beyond social engineering it is not merely wearing a uniform or presenting yourself on the telephone or in person so that you look like the kind of technician who is entitled to the information you are trying to elicit and it is not merely what the intelligence community doing human has done forever it is migrating those technologies of reinvention from human from the community into your life so that you can do it from the ground up with intention and with above all authenticity so this is also about what the digital or network revolution has meant for the practice of intelligence because human spies have had to do this for a long time and the matrix one it's been overused and there were too many movies but the first one imaged I thought very successfully how we do live in a world of managed perception and nested simulations whatever the metaphors to learn how to do this with authenticity creates mastery the management of perception at every level of society from propaganda to psyops to entertainment which gubbles in the Third Reich said was the masterpiece of propaganda this is what we're talking about as well sidebar when I was 21 years old I took a course from Steven Spender any of you remember that name probably very few one and are you telling the truth yeah okay one person well let me tell you who Steven Spender was back in the 1930s there were some English poets W. H. Auden Steven Spender and others and they also had a passion for fighting fascism because it looked to them like fascism and communism were the only two alternatives the world was going to face because in the 30s the democracies were more abundant weak and in depression literally and so they went to Spain and they did what they could to support support the loyalists and the socialists and the communists Steven Spender taught this honors seminar and writing at Northwestern I was invited to take it he was also the editor of encounter magazine now encounter magazine was the premier European non-communist left intellectual journal through which the greatest intellectuals of the European continent articulated an alternative to communism he was an authentic poet an authentic loyalist a powerful man and therefore it came as a profound shock to me when I discovered that encounter magazine from the moment it was conceived through 20 years of successful operation until it went out of business was entirely a CIA operation he said he didn't know when his liberal friends in Evanston confronted him about it he said but his wife said only if you didn't want to know did you not know where the money came from now those of you who are interested in the cultural changes that the intelligence community has wrought since World War two might look at a great book called the cultural Cold War I think Francis Stoner is the woman who wrote it in England because she also talked about this is the only other sidebar I'll go off on right here she also talked about abstract expressionist painting you familiar with that Ellsworth Kelly Jackson Pollock abstract expressionists existed but they were not prominent and they did not have any money and there was no social or cultural structure to support the kind of painting that they did or the galleries in which they came to be shown and suddenly money began to show up that supported them again as an alternative to socialist realistic art and hold them up as what a free enterprise capitalistic system could produce in the domain of art and intellectual activity it shouldn't surprise you that I'm going to say that it was discovered that the money that created the foundations and the exhibitions all over the world and magazines like encounter and 20 others in 20 other countries that were powerfully inferential were CIA operations in other words abstract expressionism wasn't invented by the CIA but they created the context which rewarded it made big money for the people who made it and they also downplayed and diminished the power of people like John Steinbeck who wrote socialist type that is sympathetic to the poor type books because they didn't want to see that in the fore so he never got the kind of support the point I'm making is that it was a shock for me to learn that the formative cultural context in which I had grown up in which I took it face value like a fish in water had been generated as an intentional construction covertly and contrary to the laws and Constitution of the United States because the central intelligence agency in the 1950s appointed itself a ministry of culture which it thought that we needed because unlike European countries in Russia we did not have one and they thought it was important to have one now the point of those stories is that what we're talking about is context and content the context of our lives growing up is often intentionally designed of which the matrix is not an exaggerated image through careful collaborative endeavor funded highly and defended robustly and covertly it's not about conspiracy this is not a conspiracy this is the covert operation of underworld overworld collaboration that we call society in the modern world it's not a conspiracy of a few people it's a vast enterprise in which we live unknowing well if you are going to participate proactively and creatively and with mastery in a world in which simulation is presented as reality and hold your own no man is going to do a talk tomorrow on tools for plausible deniability and we'll get to why that's important in this world I'm describing then the knowledge of how to invent multiple modular personas becomes important because you do not accept context at face value you see context below content you do not take the content that comes out of it at you as if it is real give you give you another quick example of context and content so you can see what I mean metaphorically Eddie Bernays the father of spin he invented public relations he invented the word public relations it didn't exist before he changed advertising into public relations he was very very good at it and he also was listed by Eisenhower when we overthrew the arbenz regime in Guatemala because he saw that what he had done in the corporate world could be useful in the geopolitical structures as well Eddie Bernays was hired in the 1920s by publishers because their book sales were falling off but instead of simply advertising books what he did is go to intellectual elite Nobel prize winners professors and ask them if literacy was important to maintaining a society in the long run and they all said of course it is and so he then asked if they would sign affidavits to that effect testifying to the importance of literacy and they did and then he took those documents to a meeting of contractors architects and builders and he asked them if they wanted to participate in strengthening America going forward in the 20th century and of course they all said they did as a result of that for the first time in American history whenever you walked into apartment buildings or houses built subsequently you almost always found built-in bookshelves that's what they created as a context and therefore people who bought houses or rented apartments with built-in bookshelves did the obvious thing without even noticing that the behavior was elicited intentionally on behalf of someone else's agenda the bookshelves are context buying books and put them putting them on it is content that's a metaphor for what I'm talking about as the social structure of the world in which we live now a lot of people think at this point that you're describing something that's fanciful and all I can tell you is that either you recognize that some of this has a great deal of resonance with the reality you intuitively perceive you want to take the right-color pill and go find out what is real and if so then you are a hacker in truth and spirit because that's what hacking in its essence is about above all unconventional creative crossing of boundaries doing whatever is necessary and covering your tracks carefully in order to know what's true and what is real so thank you so we're talking about modifying our identities and to the degree the technologies provide the context or shape for them our identities back engineered from the distributed technologies we all inhabit now unknowingly our modular fluid distributed and we are nodes in a network in other words the technologies themselves form shapes into which our lives to form and so when I start talking about this stuff 20 years ago I majored in English literature I taught English literature and writing in at the University of Illinois and then I became an Anglican priest an Episcopal priest I'm quick to say that so that you know I'm not one of those guys Anglican Episcopal priests are robustly as a rule at least 70% heterosexual and we can do anything all right so I want that on the record so you are not distracted by the sidebar that often comes up when someone says I used to be a priest well why are you not a priest no that's part of what I'm going to talk about I became an Anglican priest for 16 years I know we don't usually talk about this stuff at DEFCON but it's going to be relevant to what I'm trying to say and then after 16 years really after 13 or 14 years and this is the point on the edges I talk about the edges of society and where new technologies manifest new realities but on the edges of my own consciousness the cognitive dissonance began to buzz so much that I couldn't ignore the humming in other words what we do in our stages of life some of you will be inventing yourself for the first time and this applies to you as well as to those who need to reinvent themselves again and again we invent a persona or life structure that pretty much includes the pieces of ourselves that we can fit into it to enable us to do those things we do well and succeed in the life we choose however twisted or bent or ironic it may look to someone that's what we do we create a life structure to hold as many of the pieces of ourselves as we can and as we evolve either conditions change from within or from without or from both places and when that happens we need to pay attention to what's happening on the edges it's like other voices in other rooms that was Truman Capote's name for a book and what he was saying is the psyche is like a house and the reason there are so many haunted house or haunted spaceship or haunted boat movies are because we're talking about ourselves our psyches and the things we have pushed to the edges at which we do not want to look and so a haunted house story is always a story about the crazy aunt in the attic or the psycho in the basement who's trying to get in at us that's really aspects of ourselves with which if we if we dialogue with them then we have a possibility of entertaining integrating and moving forward if we don't they will keep getting crazier and crazier that's why it's essential to pay attention to what's happening at the edges of your very own psyche as you construct in response to conditions and technologies the life that you want to live and to identify it and to name it and to not be afraid of it so who you in fact are requires that you pay attention to what's happening on the edges it requires that you attend to it because you will change one way or the other but either you're going to be dragged along with your foot in a stirrup in the horse running or you're going to ride the horse with the reins in your own hands now those identities which we have to choose in the digital world I say they're multiple modular and so on what I'm really saying is that at any given moment because we are nodes in a network we belong simultaneously to multiple matrices to multiple spreadsheets we are overlapping cells in many three four dimensional spreadsheets and the node determines our identity at the moment of action now let me say what I mean by that who you are is determined at the moment of action not by who you think you are or how others perceive you and at the moment of action you may choose to be someone other than what people looking at you and you yourself think is who you really are let me give you an example of that a spy must maintain multiple modular identities when someone at NSA or CIA or DIA or any of the numerous intelligence agencies we have is faced with the necessity either of blowing the whistle or of betraying themselves their family in their country by giving information to what is perceived as an enemy they do not become that person until the moment of action because that moment links us to the matrix that is most congruent with those behaviors and that's we then become of for example after one of these talks in New York a guy came up because he was talking about the ethical dimension of what we have to confront and he had gone to Haiti as counterintelligence to help interdict one of the routes through which the cartels were moving cocaine into this country he was robust and gung-ho and young we all may have been at one time bless his heart he believed in his mission but the political situation in Haiti was chaotic and he didn't know if they would be able to contain the mission within the parameters they had and then they heard that the president then president was sending one of his colleagues down from once a what president but he was sending someone from Arkansas down to Haiti to help them and he was relieved because he thought the colleague was coming down to help them interdict the cartels cocaine route and what he discovered he said was that he was coming down to help make sure the cocaine route stayed open because it went through Haiti to a place in or near Arkansas in which he had a direct and very viable interest now those of you who study the deep structure of politics excuse me the deep structure of politics and the nefarious way cocaine and drug trafficking is managed by interferes with organized crime intelligence agencies and what we consider normal life you know that this is not a surprise you know that there's a reason why it's illegal and yet robustly economically profitable it serves way too many people and as an undercover cop in New York said to me who had assumed multiple identities in order to discover what he learned and he was shaken by it he said the investigations always only reach a certain level always stop short of the people who are relevant to the investigation in an ongoing way like the people at Abu Ghraib were the low hanging fruit and not the generals or secretary of defense who formulated and authorized the policy that resulted inevitably necessarily in those actions it never goes all the way to the top the ethical dilemma confronted by this person was who am I in the moment of action do I disclose what I just learned or another guy who came up who worked for a stock exchange doing primitive defense intrusion prevention actually intrusion detection and what he did is take the logs of his intrusion detection work to the board for which he worked and he showed them there were a lot of intrusions and he said we can prevent a lot of these and the word came back that no you're doing your job just right just logged them and show us what happened but don't worry about stopping them and then he discovered that that was because the people on the board were the ones hacking into the system in order to get insider information on which to trade prior to the information becoming public knowledge so very much like the man in the army with CI counterintelligence he had the quizzical Chinatown we call it from the movie expression of who am I in such a moment how do I disclose myself who do I declare myself to be so who you are in the world which is here now and is rapidly becoming more so is loyal to many matrices that affect you profoundly country corporation peer group family and in the moment of action you declare which one in fact you are congruent with Max Barry Australian writer wrote this wonderful book Jennifer government in which everybody's last name surname is government or Nike at Bob Microsoft because he learned as an Australian would necessarily engage with the world from a perspective of not controlling and dominating it that corporate loyalty is more important than any country in terms of new on saying and constraining your behavior and determining what you will do when the chips are down so whether you work for Microsoft wherever Microsoft is or for Nike or for a certain government or non-state entity that will influence more your identity in your behavior and you see you have a choice in that moment in the ambiguity of the times in which we live when you declare yourself by action of saying who in fact you are alright so nations and non-state entities are morphing boundaries are morphing identities are determined by boundaries it's really that simple nation states did not exist prior to the Renaissance and the time of the last few hundred years when they evolved as a way to draw a boundary of greater width and scope around political social economic and cultural activity the technologies post-renaissance created the need to draw boundaries around what we now call nation states and we live in them as citizens all like fish and water knowing that they are already morphing and the Jennifer governments and Bob Microsoft's and Joe Nike's are already loyal to other structures that no longer have anything to do with those government boundaries and when you look deeply in the deep political structure in that cocaine trafficking of which I was speaking which is a sidebar I won't follow up you find the same thing is true to which cartel to which self-interest do you belong and when is it activated and how so what I'm saying is I'm paraphrasing Langdon winner a computer scientist who said long ago to invent a new technology requires that society also invent the kinds of people who will use it older practices relationships identities take root the moved computer eyes and digitize means that all of our pre-existing cultural forms are going liquid it's powerful image losing their shape as they are re-tailored for computerized expression and as new pattern solidify both useful art artifacts artifacts and the texture of human relationships that surround them will be much different from what previously existed he's kind of saying in another way what Alfred North Whitehood said which is the processes that are genuinely revolutionary all but wrecked the societies in which they occur New Orleans is gone the Soviet Union is gone Czechoslovakia is gone the boundaries are gone that define those identities what I'm suggesting is that for you as individuals it is a certainty if you live very long at all that you are going to confront those crisis moments those crossroads moments in which you will perceive your boundaries also going liquid and have to perceive in that moment a self confrontation the meta self that emerges as the source of the multiple modular selves you have invented and you are going to have to determine with power volition intentionality and creativity who you choose to be in that moment and what I'm saying is that if you don't do it right you can go nuts you can go absolutely nuts you know in the ministry one of the things I learned there's a prevailing theory at the time that a conversion experience now whatever you think of all the crazy religious crap that we hear every day bombarding us from whether it's Muslim Jewish or Christian sources that's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about that genuine transformation of the psyche or soul that makes such a powerful difference in people's lives and there's a theory that says that a psychotic break is a conversion experience that was incomplete I want you to think about that for a minute the parts of yourself that's what I'm talking about became more obviously fragmented the contents of your unconscious manifested themselves to your conscious mind more vividly and powerfully may have been visionary may have been hallucinatory may have been mushroom like whatever it was the images poured forth from the unconscious in a way that compelled a reaction and if those pieces did not gather together around or coalesce around a higher center than before but came apart if the center did not hold then in fact it became a psychotic break but if it did then it made a manifestation of what I genuinely experienced in my 20s the transformation of the self in a hierarchical restructuring that is built into the very psyche hard wired into the psyche of every human being and then what religions have done is built is build narratives and stories all particular to their own cultures which try to explain that powerful transformative event so we can talk about it on the level of the individual who if they are fortunate confront the way they might go crazy if they do not reorganize the pieces of self at a higher level that religions call conversion but that I call hierarchical restructuring and for our society in the face of the powerful transformative technologies that are driving it right now you will see exactly the same phenomena and that's why it is no longer an option to know how to reinvent yourself in response to these powerful challenges it will become necessary and if you have children then the best you can do for them is give them the sum of the skills and resources not to formulate or fix an identity but to know that they will have to choose multiple identities in their lifetime one of my sons when he graduated at Northwestern they got up and they said those who major in history those who majored in English those who majored in physics then they said we have one ad hoc major and everybody laughed and my son bursting with pride right my son got up because I knew their laughter was the laughter of ignorance absolute ignorance it was the same laughter I got in the 80s when I start writing my first long piece was called computer applications for spirituality the transformation of religious experience because I saw how technology was going to transform the images ideas and identities of both self-organization culture and God in the way we frame them and I sent it to theological magazines thinking they would say you are brilliant and they said you are nuts and they sent it back with writing in the margin I swear to whoever they said who in the world does he think he is and God forbid and this is insanity five years later I sent it back to the same magazine when they had a new editor and they said this is so cutting edge and they were I honestly and they were glad to publish it and I was embarrassed because all of the references in it were so outdated that my computer friends laugh moose muds moshes not online multiple player gaming but mugs were still in there an AI old school thinking of AI but the implication of the technology was still the same now the point is I saw how things were going to transform my son saw that he needed to build a major that he called symbolic system studies that included psychology and philosophy AI mathematics computer science programming and he took pieces of all of them and built them into a major and I realized in retrospect that that was a sign of what every human adult must do going forward is create of their lives an opportunity for ongoing learning and create unceasingly a series of ad hoc majors as our interests and the necessary learning we have to have changes in response to the radical changes of the environment around us now that will sound in 2006 I think that's what it is isn't it that will sound obvious but in 1986 it sounded insane because people had an identity supported by technologies that remain relatively stable and they didn't see that they were going to have to bequeath to their children a different set of skills those kind of insights were why when I came here thanks to Jeff's invitation at Defcon for I titled my first talk hacking his practice for transplanetary life in the 21st century and all of the things which I said in that talk and in the 80s I can now see being a silverback have come true I am not an idiot or a fool except in those moments in which I am and you trust your friends and loved ones to discern the distinction between those moments and when you're having a truly prescient insight but if I had not changed careers I would have going nuts I was being offered I don't talk about this much I was being offered bishop and the biggest churches in the Episcopal church because I was known as a good preacher and I hadn't been arrested yet you know there's just which is an A plus in the moral schema if I could just do an hour on the church and what really goes on behind this if I could only tell you but in the bar talking about it thank you so what I experienced was cognitive dissonance increasing and the more I was offered these opportunities that once upon a time I might have thought were great I realized that if I tried to fit my thinking into them I would literally suffocate to death that the life structure like wrapping raw hide around yourself in those old westerns and wedding at first it's comfy then it's really tight and then it's suffocating and if I had taken bishop or the big churches and live comfortably one of them Trinity Boston offered a four-story back bay townhouse you know you can go into the church to do good and you can wind up doing really well if you play your cards right I would have died I would have died and I'll never forget the moment I said to my wife who was frightened by what I was telling her I woke up and now the cognitive dissonance was over it was a long process I'm suggesting it is a long process for each of us often and for our societies as their structures go through the same transformational process I woke up with perfect clarity congruence and peace and I said it's over I'm not only I'm going to resign from the parish I'm going to renounce orders so I have the full freedom to include myself in my brain in whatever activities it might want to pursue in the future it took courage because I was screwing over the pension I was burning my union card I was saying I will never again like Pizarro whoever it was burning the boats so they had to go forward I must go forward into whatever is next and I had no idea what was next what turned out to be next was 13 years now of speaking and writing about these issues in a way that thank God had enough meaning to people who are now using computers enough to have a sense that what I was talking about made sense I also discovered that security was the cornerstone of technology and therefore I gravitated here and also this became my life the those of you who are here who know know who you are who are my closest friends my deepest intimate friends and my confidence about the things that plague us most because the more deeply you go into security and then inevitably in intelligence I mean how many of you are here undercover just great thank you all right so the three you put up their hands are not and many of the rest are so so has it always been from the beginning I once said to somebody I'm surprised they haven't been interviewed by one of the agencies and they said oh you've been interviewed you've been interviewed the simple truth is that a number of you are here presenting yourself as one thing and you are not another and you are another you have multiple identities and you're managing them pretty successfully some of you are hardcore full-time spies some of you just doing security you know you always say where do you work DOD okay thank you and other places we always say CIA or DOD but it's really most you know military intelligence there's 16 other very very powerful extensive agencies that it's not just always area 51 you know it's there are a lot of areas underground so many of you are already doing this what I'm suggesting is the more deeply you go into this the more you discover again Chinatown moments that who you're talking to is not who you thought you were talking to and you're not sure who are your friends and you're not sure to whom you can be loyal or who you can trust this is why Nomad and his buddies from Nomad Mobile Research Center are going to offer tomorrow and I highly commend it a toolkit for building plausible deniability into your lives for things which from one point of view always can be made to look nefarious always a friend of mine does he just wrote a wonderful story about Dark Star a space plane he's been working on that one for years and finally they got an editor at Aviation Week and Space Technology had the courage to do it but he's been close to the black budget operations for a long time and he said when I was getting too close in one particular area you know you know they know it's obvious you know how to get to people they don't call them control agents or controls for no reason and he got a call and they said how's your son doing he's at West Point isn't he and he said yeah he is he says he's doing pretty well he says yeah I heard he had just you know a demerit he's yeah he has one he said well he gets to it doesn't he you don't want him to get another demerit you don't you don't want him to have to leave school in disgrace I'm sure you wouldn't want that so that was the end of that story you know it doesn't you don't have to beat people in the alley I had somebody come through Milwaukee where I live he works for a CIA proprietary used to work actively for the CIA and I've been involved with intelligence and ethics I know that sounds like an oxymoron but it's it's viable for those people who are willing to look this is what the project is about at what a lifetime of self-deception and often non-standard social behaviors due to your soul over time and it's only people are coming out the other end who can't sleep or who just have high anxiety and this guy came through and I was supposed to chair a working group for the conference last January on anomalous phenomena and I said to him so how can we talk about this and he said well you know you can't really he said what I think you ought to do is chair a group that talks about how one day you might talk about it and I said and and if we don't do that he said well he recommended a book he said read this book it shows what the agency can do how easy it is to discredit and destroy the reputation of someone especially someone like you who's independent and can easily be made to look foolish so we didn't have that working group I mean we have it but we have it quietly we have it on the side and when anomalies happen and people tell me about let me give you just one example because I can't do any talk without bringing up UFOs right this is from a counterintelligence Air Force officer who said look I have done UFO investigations of course you can't know his name we are to attempt I do it for OSI he said it requires strict evidence collection and retrieval techniques we are to attempt to disprove sightings and events where to seize photos spread disinformation discredit eyewitnesses remove and analyze any material transport evidence to a central location sign secrecy agreements with all witnesses threatening heavy fines prison time the end of their pension and disgrace if they say a word to anybody people say how do you keep secrets not so hard if it's a classified experimental aircraft we use a contractor in odd disinformation positions to cover it up but if it's what we call an other we are debriefed we turn in our clothing and we place all evidence of special containers and burn bags and the incident never happened he has done that with as many as 180 people in the basement some of them really frightened one of them sent out a flash message because he could not believe the quote-unquote thing that showed up at their base one day all right so I'm not going to say any more about that I'm going to say that I often sound crazy all right because that sounds crazy so my friends in the intelligence community with whom I've been working for several years suggest I write fiction so that's why I haven't been doing so much nonfiction lately I've reinvented myself and I published 19 short stories 20 is coming in the last two years go to my website as soon as they're published long enough I put them up there and one is coming at the end of this year called zero day Roswell zero day Roswell the first half of the story is a deathbed confession by a per intelligence professional and the set about what we do with the internet in fact for intelligence and what we have built into it and the second half is how that illuminates what really happened at the so-called Roswell incident now most people will think that the things that I know are true in that story are false and most of the stuff that I believe to be false they will believe is a revelation of truth so the multiple layers of irony are rich and delicious but that's how I have to do it now because if I say outright what I believe to be true it's so easy to make you look silly so I wrote a paper I said I would mention three things and I was afraid I wouldn't get through all this but I'm getting through a lot of it I resigned from the ministry I set myself up in a new life the bottom line is I had no idea where was going I needed people to help me I came to DEF CON in part because at the age of 49 I knew I needed to be taught by people in their teens how they were constructing reality as a result of interacting with the networks in an obsessive creative unconventional way and helping to build the net in which we now live if I did it right they would get I thought that I respected and appreciated everything they gave me when I go to conferences like this I go early and stay late in terms of the technology I am still obviously the dumbest person in the room and all of you continue to get up and teach me what I have needed to learn from the bottom up because I was fundamentally ignorant of the essentials that I needed to know one of my early talks was called social engineering and Bruce Schneier came up afterward and he said are you aware that your talk on social engineering was social engineering that you presented yourself as a friend of the hackers and you just showed up and because you created a persona and media through which you became viable credible and lived consistently and congruently with that persona it became an unceasing feedback loop and this is the key to recreating a persona it's not social engineering read Kevin Mitnick's book and you see how simplistic and easy it is to be a con man it means taking advantage of people and screwing them it's not that hard but I'm not talking about social engineering on that level we all do that some but I'm talking about going beyond that to creating a win-win situation in which you genuinely create a new persona that's viable in the world in a way that works for other people powerfully and really as well and then the feedback loop continues to take all of you up an ongoing spiral of transformation so that now when I look back at the days thank you of ministry or the teaching of English lit before now you can see continuity between the selves a passion for truth and beauty and literature then for justice and transformation in ministry and here taking this ongoing con transformational engine of technology and understanding how it is that's big and fundamental change in society is the printing press or as writing was or as speaking was when it first emerged but if you do it in a way that works for others by contributing powerfully to them as well then that bond of collegiality you cannot reinvent yourself except as something like the unabomber without mutuality you need the people in the network to give you frequent frequent valuable important feedback and you need to pay attention to it and you need to establish some standard of accountability mutuality or collegiality feedback and accountability are the keys of what keep us sane during those moments in which we are otherwise literally coming apart I was commissioned to write a long essay on the future of intelligence in 21st century in light of the technologies that are transforming and driving it forward I did the what I wrote for the think tank cannot be disseminated publicly but I can repurpose the information in it under a different title and disseminate that to my heart's content this is what I said in the introduction the intelligence community the U.S. and the world linked in cooperative activity that they choose to label counter terror are responsible for maintaining social and global order at a level of understanding beyond that formulated in the past by any nation the intelligence community in the aggregate is a global community of practitioners who share an ethos and modalities of operation that are not available to ordinary citizens and has thereby created for itself an intrinsic vocation or calling to maintain order in the world now it goes on if anybody would like a copy of that rewritten and repurposed and retitled just email me or give me a card afterward and I will send it to you it's an effort to look at why the intelligence community is the world in consort intrinsically are in practice being transformed by practice not merely in partnerships and links but into a new organic social and cultural entity that accepts the de facto responsibility for maintaining social order in the world through the management of perception and covert activity and if you look at the history of the world since nineteen forty five really you will see that there is much evidence for this having come to be somebody thought it was worthwhile enough to pay me to think about that on paper you do need to know who you are I'm almost done and the other thing I will send is I knew I wouldn't get to everything when I put this together I realized there was a lot that I wanted to write about this I was so glad Jeff actually asked me I will send the notes in total to anyone who wants them as well and I will also offer a third thing which is when I have been going through these profound personal transformations I've needed to gather on the edges the echoes or voices I could barely hear and bring them into the foreground so that I could see what in fact it was that I wanted to do years and years ago in one of the human potential movement episodes called est I was given a single page exercise that is a powerful tool that helps me do that and I returned to it again and again and that too I will share free with anybody who wants it I think I have time for a question but no I don't really let me just conclude by saying Whitehead was right the major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur what is going to be called forth from you going forward if you live with earnestness and commitment and intentionality into the world is going to be something you do not know now you have and it's in those moments of confrontation and crisis where you decide who you are in the moment of action what is congruent with you about the system of belief or commitment to action that you have formulated in the past that now becomes your karma and becomes that moment of action and decision the truth of your world as you utter it in your life it's really no joke I talked about the threat of going crazy I thought I was going to go crazy when I went through the transformational process attended by religious experience and psychic phenomena that subsequently was given coherence insanity by the Anglican church in a way that let me tame it and live with it at a hierarchical level of restructuring that changed who I was forever so we're not talking about stuff that is innocent or trivial we're talking about stuff that is deep and dark and always ambiguous and never clear until the very last moment so use each other and the trusted colleagues that you have use the tools that our traditions have developed to enable you to walk through these moments of transformation and then you will be able to teach your children as well what are the resources and skills that they will need not to be who you want them to be but to invent themselves with the same kind of capacity for creativity along the way I have excuse me I have cards I'll put out email address is our theme R T H I E M E at theme works dot com you can find it my website is W W W dot theme works dot com and I want to give away two books is there anybody here who's under twenty five memories to play spot the fed now we play spot the hacker okay you're real hacker right committed to all the right things anyone over fifty you still have time to read powerful interesting introspection reflection okay thanks I have a handful of books I'll be at the vendors area if anybody wants one for twenty bucks buy one if you want to buy it on the web for fifty cents for some cheap bastard go ahead but I will sign it and inscribe it and fill it with love okay thank you